The common complaint against sports games is that they don't change much from year to year. And while that's only partially true (and not fully a fair critique to my mind), that level of annual consistency bears itself out in the reviews numbers. As recently reported in a recent article from gamesindustry.biz, six of the top twenty "most consistent" game development studios (from a Metacritic review score perspective) are involved, either primarily or partially, in sports games, with 2K Sports' dev house Visual Concepts coming in at the top of the list.

　　Here's the full list, with the highlighted sports dev studios highlighted:

　　1. Visual Concepts (2K Sports series)

　　2. EA Tiburon (Madden NFL, NCAA Football, Tiger, NASCAR)

　　3. Nintendo

　　4. EA Sports (FIFA)

　　5. Neversoft Entertainment

　　6. Konami Tokyo (Winning Eleven series)

　　7. Harmonix

　　8. Sports Interactive (Worldwide Soccer Manager, Football Manager Live)

　　9. Intelligent Systems

　　10. Valve

　　11. Rockstar North

　　12. BioWare

　　13. EA Canada (Fight Night, NHL, NBA Live)

　　14. Criterion

　　15. Bethesda Softworks

　　16. Raven Software

　　17. Firaxis

　　18. Insomniac Games

　　19. Infinity Ward

　　20. Epic Games

　　Visual Concepts, known for its classic NFL 2K series also presides over the consistently great NBA 2K series and, this year, took over development duties of the MLB 2K series. This year's baseball game was pretty poorly received--which makes me wonder what this chart will look like in a year if MLB 2K10 doesn't deliver. Nonetheless, while there's something to be said for the kind of quality that sports games deliver year in and year out, this kind of chart is likely reasoning enough for publishers and developers to not want to upset the apple cart when it comes to innovation.